Jean-Louis Calandrini

Jean-Louis Calandrini (1703 to 1758) was a Genevan scientist who served as professor of mathematics and of philosophy at the Academy of Geneva. He was the son of a Reformed pastor of the same name, and the grandnephew of Bénédict Calandrini. At the Academy he obtained a doctorate in physics in 1722, while still eighteen, with a thesis on the theory of colours that followed Isaac Newton. In 1724 he was named professor of mathematics at the same time as Gabriel Cramer, after first making a three-year journey to France and England, and he held a chair of philosophy from 1734 to 1750. He wrote studies on the aurora borealis, comets and the effects of lightning, an important but unpublished work on plane and spherical trigonometry, and a commentary on Newton Principia, published at Geneva from 1739 to 1742, to which he contributed about a hundred footnotes. He was also known as a botanist, and the genus Calandrinia is named after him.